Ana Maria Tavares' video installation 'Airshaft (to Piranesi)' (2008) will be on view in 'Deviating Utopias' at the Frist Center through Jan. 12.

Stepping into Ana Maria Tavares' "Airshaft (to Piranesi)" is like being suspended in an aquamarine-tinted virtual world of infinite spaces. The walls seem to recede, the highly reflective black floor seems to drop away and an atmospheric soundtrack fills the space.

This installation is the first time the 2008 piece has been paired with music. It's part of "Deviating Utopias," an exhibition of Tavares' work at the Frist Center of the Visual Arts through Jan. 12.

Tavares was interested in working with an experimental composer, one who shared "her fascination with fragmentation and reconstitution of the given," Frist Center curator Mark Scala wrote in an email.

Artist and curator chose Nashville-based composer Brian Siskind after viewing a video of him performing an original composition in the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

"I had to take these abstract cues, the historical precedent, and then the aesthetic and general function of what she was making or had made," Siskind said.

Since Tavares often references Oscar Niemeyer's mid-century modernist architecture in her native Brazil, Siskind took passages and sounds from 1950s classical albums ("clicking and popping" included), then layered and sequenced them to make "Niteroi, water that hides."

The resulting composition works so well with "Airshaft" it's difficult to imagine the piece without it.

"For me, the quality of floating - not just optically but viscerally - is one of the most the affecting aspects of 'Airshaft.' Brian's composition intensifies this," Scala wrote. "His combined sounds express detachment, of being unmoored in a distorted space that conflates architecture and water."

While Siskind wanted to be true to Tavares' vision, he also wanted to create a "stand-alone listening experience." His 25-minute soundscape is available as a limited edition CD, sold in the Frist gift shop, Grimey's record shop and Siskind's website (www.fognode.virb.com).

- MiChelle Jones, for The Tennessean

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Frist Center exhibition increases atmosphere with music

Stepping into Ana Maria Tavares' 'Airshaft (to Piranesi)' is like being suspended in an aquamarine-tinted virtual world of infinite spaces. The walls seem to recede, the highly reflective black floor